The BBC used to stand for the best of British - but who'd trust Auntie now?

Last updated at 00:30 16 July 2007

The BBC is in serious trouble. In the space of one week it has suffered three serious blows to its credibility as a broadcaster of integrity which can be relied upon to tell the truth.

First, it was fined £50,000 after it faked the results of a Blue Peter competition last November.

The show allowed a child visiting the studio to pose as a caller when technical problems stopped real calls getting through. The BBC was criticised for 'negligence' and for 'making a child complicit' in the deception.

In the wake of this disaster, its director of vision Jana Bennett seemed to be tacitly admitting that the BBC cupboard was packed with skeletons about to come tumbling out, when she urged staff to identify programmes 'where you feel there may be a risk that in some way audiences could have been misled'.

She didn't have long to wait. Within a few hours of her panicky request, the BBC was engulfed by a fresh and even more explosive revelation that it had put out a false accusation about the Queen.

The Controller of BBC1, Peter Fincham, gloated at a press launch of the BBC's autumn schedule that a forthcoming documentary would show the Queen had 'walked off in a huff'.

He showed the Press a trailer which purported to show the Queen storming off from a photo-shoot after being asked to remove her crown by celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz.

This turned out to be an outright falsification. The footage had been edited in such a way as to reverse the actual sequence of events. The Queen did not storm out; she made the remarks on her way in.

Yesterday, in an echo of this most damaging debacle, it was revealed in addition that BBC TV's Newsnight had similarly reversed a filmed sequence of events, this time apparently to present the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, in a bad light.

The sequence purported to show that Mr Brown's press officer had told the police to question a Newsnight reporter under antiterror laws in retaliation for an earlier confrontation between them. In fact, the two events had taken place weeks apart and in reverse order.

As a result, Mr Brown's officials complained to the Corporation about an 'unfair, unbalanced, unnecessarily personal and disingenuous' film which they claim was altered to make Mr Brown look like a thug.

Newsnight's editor, Peter Barron, has admitted that the sequence of events was reversed, but has refused to apologise. The BBC has insisted there was no intention to deceive. Disingenuous, or what?

As Lady Bracknell might have said, one such occurrence may be regarded as carelessness, but two begin to look like systematic abuse.

The Newsnight revelations are particularly serious because this second sequence reversal appears to undermine the BBC's defence over the Queen footage.

The BBC swiftly passed the buck to the production company that supplied the film clips for that trailer, saying that Mr Fincham had used them in good faith.

But both the BBC and the production company claim that these images were never meant for public display - and the production company has also said that when it learned the BBC intended to put out a trailer for its documentary, it repeatedly asked to be shown the footage, but never received an answer.

The question of precisely who edited these images in the wrong order, and why, remains a mystery and requires an urgent answer. But in any event, the BBC has no defence.

It has a responsibility to ensure that everything it puts out is correct. The BBC would have us believe that it put out a trailer without checking that it was both truthful and an accurate reflection of the programme. This is scarcely responsible journalism, particularly since it involved a sensational claim about the Queen's behaviour.

And even after it was told by an outraged Buckingham Palace that the account was untrue, the BBC carried on promoting this falsehood for a full 17 hours before admitting its error. Moreover, the BBC has no one else to blame for the frauds perpetrated by Blue Peter and Newsnight.

What's going on here seems to be a cynical and unprincipled chase after ratings in an ever-more cut-throat broadcasting marketplace - allied in turn to a particular cast of mind.

For it is hard not to conclude that Mr Fincham was only too eager to believe that the Queen had indeed stormed out of the photo- shoot - because he wanted to believe the Queen behaves badly.

And that certainly fits with the institutionalised infantile Leftism that passes for neutrality at the BBC.

Indeed, questions about the integrity of the BBC's processes are intimately bound up with questions about the integrity of its journalism.

In recent months, concern has steadily mounted that our public service broadcaster is abusing its position by systematically presenting events through a distorting ideological prism.

Both present and former BBC names have spoken about the Left-wing groupthink that saturates its coverage.

In his recent book Can We Trust The BBC?, its former journalist Robin Aitken provides example after example of its bias to show that we cannot.

And only yesterday, the Centre for Policy Studies published an excoriating analysis by the writer Sir Antony Jay - co-author of the brilliant BBC TV comedy series Yes Minister - of the BBC mindset to which he acknowledges he himself once subscribed.

He paints a picture of a BBC in which arrogance and a false sense of moral superiority combine with gross ignorance of the real world to spread an ideology 'based not on observation and deduction but on faith and doctrine', and into which all events are wrenched to fit.

What all this means is that objectivity has been replaced by ideology.

With an attitude that regards all challenges to its warped world-view as beyond the moral pale, it follows axiomatically that the truth goes out of the window altogether.

Most disturbingly of all, that world-view is never challenged. As Sir Antony writes, BBC employees mix only with people who think like themselves.

They are therefore totally unable to tolerate the idea that there is room for any other approach. They represent a totally closed-thought system.

And this shocking state of affairs is hugely reinforced by the licence fee, which cushions the BBC from any significant challenge that calls it to account.

The BBC is a mighty global brand. Through its website, it is increasingly reaching deep into America, Australia and the rest of the English-speaking world.

The reason is that the BBC is trusted like no other news organisation as a kitemark of integrity and objectivity.

But over many years, it has systematically abused that trust. Now, its power to disseminate falsehoods to people all over the world who place blind faith in its every utterance is truly terrifying.

More and more are arguing that it is intolerable for the public to subsidise such an engine of disinformation and that the BBC must now be subjected to the chill winds of competition by abolishing the licence fee.

The BBC once stood for all that was glorious and admirable about Britain. After these latest revelations, however, the need for an urgent rethink of its public service role is an argument that is hard to resist.